Friday, July 03, 2009
Mutuality
This week we find Jesus powerless to work miracles.
He came to his home-town Nazareth, the Gospel says, and “he was not able to perform any mighty deed there, apart from curing a few sick people by laying his hands on them.”
Why not?
It is an intriguing question, because most of us think of miracles as based on power, as acts done by a mighty person. Jesus, God in human form, must have been all-powerful, just as God is. What was stopping him?
Let us take a different look at miracles. Instead Jesus being a solo act, an individual who does a whole lot of terrific things, try seeing him as the enfleshment of God. This will shift the question and make us look at what God is.
There are many answers, of course, but the one that is most agreed upon is very simple. God is love. God has loved human beings since he first created them.
Alright, you say, if he loves the blind and the lame and the homeless, why couldn’t he use that Godly love in Nazareth? What took away his powers?
Now we are getting to the heart of the question. Think of a love relation. Doesn’t love have to be two-way? I know that we must often go without the return of love from people we care for, but that is not the ideal. For a relationship to be real, I must be loved and I must love in return. Mutuality is love’s hallmark.
So we must say that God reality consists of mutual love. There will be time later to speak of the love dynamic that exists within the Trinity. Right now it is enough to see that all through the Old and New Testament God was thirsting for a shared union with human beings. “I will be your God, and you will be my people and love me in return.” Please!
Now we can see what took away Jesus’ miracles. The people in his home-town would not accept him. These people already had him in a category—carpenter. son of that working couple Joseph and Mary, the guy who used to live down the street. Who does he think he is preaching all this new stuff? So instead of listening to what he said, they made the noise with their tongues that we spell “tut,” which in the Midwest United States means, “look who is trying to put on airs. We know who he really is.”
They were pre-sealed against him.
But Jesus was not a circus performer or a magician. He did not work miracles in order to be noticed or to show off. In fact he took great pains to avoid being noticed.
This is why he said so often to the people he healed, “your faith has saved you.” Jesus’ miracles were an outcropping of the living, loving bonding we are invited to have with him. Faith is our acceptance of that bonding and without it God’s loving power cannot reach us.
Think it over. Do you and I ever listen to the offer of love from Christ and then harden our hearts to it? We can be quite crusty, you an I, and maybe we need to soften up a bit.
Fr. John Foley, S. J.
